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CONTESTED VISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
Slide 1
Text: Contested Visions: The Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877)
[Painting of Civil War battle)
Audio: This lecture is going to have four sections. I will begin with some miscellaneous details
on the military conduct of the Civil War. Then I'm going to give a strategic overview, looking at
the major strategies on both sides and make my determination as to how effective that each side
chose to fight the conflict. Then I'm going to take you through the major turning points and
missed opportunities of the war and finally, we'll examine the period of reconstruction. It's
important to note that unlike the European militaries of the time, with their professional soldiers,
America had no significant standing army when the war broke out. There was merely a small
force designed for garrisoning coastal forts and protecting settlers on the western frontier. So
initially both sides had to call for plenty of volunteers and they got them. As a matter of fact, the
Confederacy had to turn away most of its first recruits, since it did not even have the capacity or
the infrastructure, if you will, to absorb them. However, before this war would be over, both
sides would end up utilizing the draft, and in both cases it would be unpopular. Please keep in
mind that most Civil War soldiers were new to military life. They showed up with too much gear
and in the cases of some wealthy volunteers, they even showed up with servants. Strict discipline
was difficult to achieve as distinctions in rank were not appreciated by civilians. There were no
officer candidate schools to develop expertise, just a few military academies scattered across the
country. In what might seem as one of the most bizarre features of the war, given our modern
sensibilities today, senior officers were typically appointed by politicians and junior to mid-grade
officers were often elected by the men below them. So there's not the sort of emphasis on merit
that we're more accustomed to today. Oftentimes, elections of officers could come down to
popularity contests, and in the case of those senior officers, colonels and generals, a leader like
Abraham Lincoln might be forced to accept somebody who was clearly incompetent but if you
wanted the political support of different governors and members of Congress, you had to go
along with letting them put their cronies into high military positions. In other words, if you're
someone like President Lincoln who's trying to hold a political coalition together, you may often
be put in a position where you feel like political considerations have to trump military
considerations and this would be a real problem for him. Back to general features of the war,
much of the close order drill performed as training, when these soldiers would first show up to
get acclimated into the service, must of the close order drill was designed to get soldiers to
convert rapidly from a marching formation to one designed for fighting. There actually was little
opportunity for target practice, which you'd think would be pretty important. Having more
backwoodsmen or frontiersmen gave the South a bit of an edge at first. It's also worth noting that
the technology was significantly better than in America's war for independence more than 70
years earlier. The old inaccurate smoothbore muskets the patriots had used had given way to a
muzzle loaded variety that was accurate up to half a mile. The problem however, was that most
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CONTESTED VISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
officers still used old tactics, typical of the Revolutionary War, which meant massing together
men in order to concentrate their fire power. But in putting them together in these dense
formations, it also made them easier targets. At least on the defensive, soldiers in the Civil War
were more likely to use the terrain and manmade structures for cover. Artillery had become
much deadlier than in the age of the American Revolution. Muzzle loaded cannon had
tremendous penetrating power while the old smoothbores could shoot canisters of lead slugs that
would have the effect of a sawed off shotgun. It could decimate formations. Mortars, with their
higher angle of fire were ideal for use against fortifications and other prepared field positions.
The Union had much more artillery and generally better trained crews. In the area of cavalry, the
South had the edge. More of their soldiers were expert horsemen. It was not until 1863 that the
Union could even begin to challenge the legendary Jeb Stuart of the Confederate States of
America. In the West, the Confederate cavalry officer was Nathan Bedford Forrest, who after the
war would pay a key role in the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. But during the Civil War, cavalry
was used mainly for scouting. Both sides had corps of engineers who built bridges, opened roads,
repaired railroads, strung telegraph wire and laid out fortifications. Robert E. Lee of the
Confederacy was himself, the finest engineer on either side. Most of the more than 600,000
deaths in this conflict were the result of diseases that swept through encampments and wounds
that became infected due to inadequate medical facilities. The worst illnesses were typhoid,
dysentery, pneumonia and malaria. For every soldier who died from combat, another nearly three
succumbed to disease. The Confederate war effort was so disorganized that there never really
was a specified uniform. Southerners could easily be wearing a combination of clothing sent
from home and other articles scavenged from dead Union soldiers. Camp life tended to be dull,
though Union troops began to play a new game called baseball. Army food was poor, consisting
mainly of hardtack, a form of bread, also salt pork and coffee. Soldiers lived off of the land as
much as possible, usually at the expense of civilians. Food was so scarce in the South that
Confederates sometimes plundered their own communities. Most punishments were light, though
the penalty for desertion was death. Neither side put much effort into maintaining proper prison
conditions and the prison exchange system broke down in 1864. Why? Mainly because the South
would not respect black troops as legitimate. One thing that will be covered a bit later in this
lecture is that the Union eventually decides to rely upon African American soldiers. There are
many horrific stories of prison conditions during the Civil War. The worst case was at a
Confederate camp in Andersonville, a Georgia hamlet in the middle of a pine forest and swampy
marshes. In the summer of 1864, about 32,000 Union prisoners were crowded into an open air
stockade. Some of them had rudimentary tents, but many of them had to sleep out in the open, in
the elements. Over the course of six months, almost 13,000 of that original 32,000 died. Near the
end of the war, their food ration was a pint of coarse cornmeal and a tablespoon of peas a day.
The camp commander ended up being put to death after the war for his mismanagement of the
situation. But the Northern track record was not that great either.
Slide 2
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CONTESTED VISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
Text: Fort Sumter (symbolic beginning of war)
[Painting of Fort Sumter under fire]
Audio: Let me set the stage now for the symbolic beginning of the war. In early 1861, Abraham
Lincoln took office as President of the United States, having been elected in November of 1860.
However, before he even took the oath of office, seven Southern states had already seceded from
the Union. They were all from the Deep South, namely Florida, South Carolina, Georgia,
Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. They set up their first capital in Montgomery,
Alabama and selected a man named Jefferson Davis, a former Senator and Secretary of War, as
their president. In other words, enough political figures and citizens in those particular states did
not even wait around to see what an Abraham Lincoln presidency would be like before they
decided to leave the Union. They did not trust Lincoln's promise that he would not touch slavery
where it already existed in these Southern states; they left. But there were still other states
remaining in the Union where slavery was legal. And where their loyalties would ultimately lie
was an open question as Abraham Lincoln took office in early 1861. Meanwhile, there was
another issue. In all of these Southern states, there were federal military facilities. In some cases
forts, that were still technically supposed to be flying the US flag and under the control of federal
troops. But now because these seven Southern states had left the Union, their authorities were
claiming that they now should occupy and control these facilities. And one of these federal
military facilities was in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, and that was Fort Sumter,
named after a hero of the American Revolution. And Fort Sumter would ultimately become the
flashpoint around which the Civil War would begin. Abraham Lincoln, after taking office, was
concerned about trying to bring reinforcements and supplies to this fort because initially its
garrison was not in a position to hold out for very long. While this garrison was waiting to get
reinforcements, the Confederacy forced the issue. In April of 1861, Confederate artillery
batteries in Charleston opened up on Fort Sumter and the two sides traded cannonades as is
depicted here in this painting. Ironically, the Union commander at Fort Sumter, a Major Robert
Anderson, was being faced on the other side by a Confederate general, P.G.T. Beauregard, who
had been one of his students at West Point, the United States Military Academy in New York. As
a matter of fact, Beauregard had been such an excellent student of Anderson's that after
Beauregard graduated from West Point, Anderson sought to have him work with him further.
This is just one of many examples of where former comrades now found themselves on opposite
sides of this conflict. In any case, after a sustained artillery barrage by both sides, Robert
Anderson eventually surrendered Fort Sumter because he couldn't hold out any longer waiting
for reinforcements from the North. Ironically, no soldiers were killed in this engagement. One
horse died in this artillery barrage, to begin a conflict that would ultimately take over 600,000
lives. So Fort Sumter is not militarily significant but politically it was very much so. Once word
spread across the country that now shots had been exchanged, that really hardened up the
political loyalties of American citizens. After Fort Sumter, four more slave states decided to
leave the Union. Those states were: North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas. So now
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CONTESTED VISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
this Confederacy had grown to 11 states and recognizing Virginia's power and importance to the
Confederacy, the Confederate capital was now moved to Richmond, Virginia. So Jefferson Davis
would be attempting to set up his government there. So 11 Southern states had now left the
Union by the time you've hit the end of the Fort Sumter engagement, or shortly thereafter. But
please keep in mind, there were four states where slavery was still legal that stayed in the Union.
Now slaves were not in huge numbers in these states, but the states of Missouri, Kentucky,
Delaware and Maryland stayed in the Union despite slavery still being legal. And I'm
emphasizing that point because this was part of what put Abraham Lincoln in a very delicate
political position and affected his stance on slavery, because he didn't want to lose those four
states. He didn't want them either to secede or for large numbers of their citizens to find ways to
frustrate the war effort and not cooperate with it, maybe give the South supplies, give them
military intelligence, whatever the case may be. So it was a tricky thing. So this is not a neat war
of free states versus slave states. It's going to be a bit more complicated than that. But in any
case, Fort Sumter, much like the little engagement at Lexington Green, in Massachusetts in April
of 1775, you know, "The shot heard round the world," again, not all that militarily significant,
but it kicks off the American War for Independence. Fort Sumter plays that role in the case of the
Civil War.
Slide 3
Text: Union and Confederate Strategies
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Matching military tactics to political realities
Confederacy ignored possibility of war of attrition – the successful model offered by
Patriots in 1776
Lincoln recognized the need to take the war to the South dramatically
Conflict initially defined as a war to restore the Union rather than an anti-slavery crusade
Audio: As I prepare to discuss the strategies on both sides, let me say a few things about the
geography of the Civil War. This conflict can basically be divided into two theaters or fronts.
And Eastern theaters centered in Virginia, since the Confederate union capitals at Richmond and
Washington, DC respectively were so close. As you can imagine, in the Eastern theater there
would be constant efforts to somehow drive upon the enemy's capital. And then there's a Western
theater on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains. And in many ways, it would be a tale of
two wars. The union had reasonably consistent success in the West right from the beginning and
continuing on through the duration of the conflict. But the union struggled for much of the time
in the East. And Abraham Lincoln would go through many commanders trying to find the right
leader to give him decisive victories in that part of the war. The two most famous armies of the
war were the Army of Northern Virginia that was eventually commanded by Robert E. Lee of
Virginia and the Army of the Potomac. And this was the unit that had the greatest amount of
turnover, as I mentioned a moment ago. Abraham Lincoln kept firing Generals, and at least one
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CONTESTED VISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
case rehiring the General and then firing him a second time. So let's turn now to a strategic
overview of the conflict. When analyzing any war, it is important to recognize the need to
coordinate your military strategy with your political goals. Let me explain. If you were part of
the Confederate leadership planning for war, your political goal was relatively simple. Compel
the union to recognize your independence. This happens to be the same goal that patriots had
faced in the American Revolution. So what is the best military strategy to achieve that goal? All
you have to do is make the conflict costly enough that your opponent loses the will to fight. Does
that mean that you necessarily have to capture union territory and occupy parts of it for long
periods of time? No. I mean, sure, it would help if you could but that may not be realistic. And I
would suggest that it wasn't because the South suffered about a three to one inferiority in
available manpower and had much less in the way of industrial resources and railway lines. All
that the Confederacy had to do was what George Washington had learned by the end of 1776
during the American Revolution and, that is, fight and not to lose. If you can keep forces in the
field, no matter how often they're defeated or how little territory they occupy, your enemy has to
continue to give chase to destroy every vestige of resistance by your rebellion. So you can use
skirmishes with your larger forces and guerrilla hit-and-run tactics with smaller units to make it
what's called a "War of Attrition" that gradually wears down your enemy. I am suggesting that
this was the path that the South should have chosen, but for the most part, that will not be the
case. Now granted, there were some successful guerrilla fighters among the Confederates. Some
of you may have heard of Colonel John Mosby, who had a great deal of success in portions of
Virginia. There was also a man out West, William Quantrill, who put together a gang of
basically psychopaths who terrorized union communities. But for the most part, the Confederacy
chose to slug it out toe-to-toe with union forces. Now granted, they did not do too badly in this
regard, especially in the Eastern Theater with the leadership of men like Robert E. Lee and
Thomas Stonewall Jackson. But I think that their odds for alternate victory would have been
much better taking an approach closer to what the patriots of our Revolution decided. And
unfortunately, also the strategy that was used by America's enemies in the Vietnam Conflict.
And again, that was to fight a War of Attrition. Now why did the Confederacy choose a more
conventional war against a foe that was more numerous and better armed? Well, some of it was a
matter of pride. Many Southerners did not think it necessary to have to fight a conflict of
frequent retreating and hiding for ambushes. On a more tangible level, the issue of states' rights
came into play. To make the insurgency strategy work or a War of Attrition, you had to be
willing to see much of your real estate occupied by enemy forces, especially in those areas
bordering the union. But individual Southern states had trouble appreciating that big picture of
what it was going to take to win the war. Throughout the conflict, Confederate President
Jefferson Davis had much difficulty getting full cooperation from state leaders in terms of
providing supplies and troops and coordinating strategy. Much of this dilemma stem from the
political reality that the Confederacy was a product of a States Rights Movement. There was not
much consensus for a strong federal government. As a matter of fact, the very term,
Confederacy, you know, as a political science term, refers to only a loose alliance of states. But
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CONTESTED VISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
of course, when you get into a war, you need more of a centralizing authority to manage the
hostilities. Frankly, the Confederacy never had it. So the main point here is that the Confederacy
did not select a military strategy that best fit its political goals. In fact, Southern forces will
invade the union twice, which is, of course, the very opposite of a War of Attrition, and suffer
costly defeats in the process. And we'll get to those episodes a bit later. Let's turn now to the
union strategic picture. Here, the political goals were much more complicated. For Abraham
Lincoln and his government to be successful, much like the British Empire back in the 1770's
and '80's, he had to take the war to the South and extinguish every major piece of resistance. This
is why he rejected a strategy offered to him at the beginning of the conflict by General Winfield
Scott, who was the Head of the US Army at the time. Now Scott was well past his prime. He was
a hero of the Mexican war back in the 1840's. He was so obese at this point that he couldn't even
really ride a horse, and he's about to get replaced. But before he's out the door, he proposed what
was called, the Anaconda Plan. And of course, many of you know that an Anaconda is a type of
snake that gradually crushes its victims to death. And so building upon that analogy, the idea
here is that the North would rely upon a naval blockade of the Confederate coast and also its
major rivers in order to strangle gradually the Southern economy and bring this [inaudible]. Now
in terms of eliminating casualties, the Anaconda Plan is a great idea because it most likely would
have avoided just about all the titanic battles that actually ended up taking place. But from a
political perspective, Lincoln knew that he could not make the Anaconda Plan work. With
several slave states remaining uneasily in the union and with much of the Northern public
unwilling at first to fight an all out war against the South, Lincoln knew that he needed to
produce dramatic results quickly or public opinion which shift against fighting this conflict to
complete victory. More and more Northern citizens would decide that it's just better to let the
South have its independence and get on with their lives. So Lincoln did not have the time to
build the naval resources necessary to implement this blockade and wait for it to work by
himself. Now don't get me wrong, he is going to blockade the Confederate coast and its rivers
and do the best he can to strangle the South, but that strangling is going to be part of a much
broader strategy of invading the South and tackling major concentrations of forces. So what I'm
alternately driving at here is that Lincoln did a better job of matching his military strategies to his
political goals. Now that being said, it was still going to be very difficult to win the war. The
union navy was almost non-existent when the conflict began. The number of trained troops
remaining in its Army were small. I mean, keep in mind, many Southern officers decided to
leave the US military and join the Confederacy. The most famous, of course, was Robert E. Lee,
and we'll get back to him in a moment. And as I have hinted at, the Northern public was far from
united behind the war. Many Northern Democrats were not in favor of being too aggressive
against the South. And there were areas in the slave states remaining in the union where
Confederate sympathizers had significant forces. Now you may be wondering, why would not all
Northern Democrats be in favor of being aggressive against the South? Most of the leadership of
the Confederacy came from Southern Democrats. Now the Democratic Party had split in the
election of 1860, and it's a big reason why Abraham Lincoln had been triumphant. But for many
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CONTESTED VISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
Northern Democrats, they still looked forward to the reuniting of the country and rebuilding
political bridges. So they had a somewhat different agenda compared to many Republicans when
it came to the prosecution of the war. Some Northern Democrats, who were dubbed copperheads,
used their influence to argue for the union to drop out of the war as soon as possible. Some of
these copperheads behaved in a way that could legitimately be classified as treason, which is a
crime punishable by death in wartime. As I mentioned a moment ago, many of the Army's finest
officers left to join the South, most notably, Robert E. Lee of Virginia. Lincoln actually offered
Lee command of all union forces. I mean, Lincoln recognized Lee was the finest officer in the
US military. Now Lee had not been in favor of Virginia leaving the union. But once that step had
been taken, he decided that he could not take up arms against his native state. His ancestral home
happened to be in Arlington, Virginia, which is right across the river from Washington, DC, and
it was soon occupied by union forces once the war got underway. And ironically, the decision
was made to turn Lee's former plantation into a military cemetery. And today Arlington National
Cemetery is hollowed ground, with so many of our veterans buried there, but it had been
previously Robert E. Lee's property. Just a bit of an antidote there. Now let's get back to
Lincoln's challenges. He wanted the best minds in his cabinet. So he appointed several
individuals who were political rivals, and thus, not guaranteed to act in his best interest. For
Lincoln to end up holding this coalition together, the way that he did, was amazing. Keep in
mind that he originally defined the war as a fight against a session, as a fight against the illegality
of those Southern states leaving, rather than defining the war as an assault or a crusade upon
slavery. He recognized that this was the only way to have a decent shot at keeping those
remaining slave states in the union. He further saw that racial views in the North just would not
support depicting this conflict as a sort of humanitarian crusade. To make a long story short,
there was a prevailing hierarchy of race operating in American society at this time and it was
backed up by a very thin veneer of science, crackpot science, quite frankly, but there was this
idea that you could systematically rank races and ethnicities according to their intellectual ability
and moral character. And Africans were at the bottom of this hierarchy, not surprisingly, in the
America of the time, and plenty of Northerners bought into that. Abraham Lincoln himself, to a
large extent, bought into that hierarchy of race. As a matter of fact, Lincoln was in no hurry to
emancipate or free the slaves, even though he absolutely deplored their treatment. So for the time
being, he stuck to the legalistic argument that the union was indivisible as a constitutional
principle such that individual states could not break this contract, if you will. Now in 1862, due
to new developments that we'll cover, Lincoln will begin to redefine the war and it will
eventually become a war more about ending slavery. But at first, it was to be a white man's fight
and both sides agreed upon that. Before I leave this slide, I would like to turn to the first major
battle of the war just to give you some flavor of the conflict. By July of 1861, a few months after
Fort Sumter, both sides had mustered a significant Army in the vicinity of Washington, DC.
Union General Irvin McDowell commanded about 30,000 troops, while Confederate General
PGT Beauregard led a Southern force of about 22,000. Thanks to the late arrival of additional
forces by rail, the odds would be about even once the fighting commenced. The South's
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CONTESTED VISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
defensive position was along Bull Run Creek, near the town of Manassas Junction. In an irony of
the war, the two sides sometimes did not even agree on what to call their battles. The North
utilized nearby landmarks to name their engagements, while the South intended to refer to the
closest community. So you have the first battle of Bull Run or Manassas Junction, depending
upon your background. It is important to note that most of the soldiers on both sides were
extremely inexperienced and had little expectation that this would be a lengthy conflict. Many
members of Congress and their families showed up to watch the engagement from a nearby
hillside as though this was a social event. They expected the Confederate war effort to be rolled
up on this very day. At first, the battle went well for the union, as Southern lines began to buckle.
But one Confederate officer rallied his troops by asking them to follow the example of the
Virginians, under the command of Robert Jackson, who were, as this officer put it, standing like
a stone wall. At this moment a legend was born, as Thomas Stonewall Jackson would become
the finest of Robert E. Lee's field commanders. The union assault also faltered when one of its
units misidentified attacking Southerners in blue uniforms. I had mentioned earlier that the South
did not have a consistent uniform. The union uniforms were almost uniformly blue. So a union
unit hesitated to fire upon soldiers that saw coming at them because they were in blue. In any
case, once the tide of the battle began to turn, the union line simply collapsed. Instead of an
orderly retreat, complete panic set in. As a matter of fact, the main highway to Washington, DC
was essentially undefended for the Confederates to march right into the capital. As union troops
fled, the partygoers got mixed up in the chaos. But the South was every bit as disorganized in its
victory as the union was in defeat. So the full potential of the Bull Run triumph was not
achieved. The Confederacy did not march on into Washington, DC. But by the time this battle
was over, it was becoming clearer that the war would not end quickly.
Slide 4
Text: Turning Points/Missed Opportunities of the Civil War
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As argued by historian James McPherson
Summer 1862 – Peninsular Campaign
Fall 1862 – First Confederate invasion of North
Summer/Fall 1863 – Confederacy permanently on the defensive
Summer 1864 – Fall of Atlanta and Lincoln’s re-election
Audio: Given the constraints of time, I am not going to attempt to give you a blow-by-blow
description of the entire Civil War. What I'd like to do is to use the argument of America's
foremost historian on the Civil War, James McPherson to make a case that there were four key
turning points or missed opportunities in the Civil War. There were four moments where you
were really at a crossroads in terms of how the conflict was going to ultimately unfold. And I'm
going to tell you both what actually happened at each of these four moments and then also
suggest what likely would have happened if you'd had a different outcome. So by focusing on
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CONTESTED VISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
these four episodes, I think it helps to give an appropriate overview for the Civil War. Just to
introduce them very briefly for now, the first turning point/missed opportunity will come in the
summer of 1862, when General George McClellan of the Army of the Potomac will launch a
major offensive against the Confederacy which, had it been successful and had captured the
Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, the conflict likely would have come to an end far
more earlier than was actually the case. But that offensive will be unsuccessful and I'm about to
describe it. The next turning point/missed opportunity will come in the fall of 1862, when the
Confederacy will launch a two-pronged invasion of the North that was designed to coincide with
mid-term Congressional elections in the North such that public opinion might be demoralized
and more anti-war politicians might get elected in the North, if the Confederacy was successful.
However this invasion will fail, it will be a missed opportunity for the Confederacy. Then we'll
turn to several battles in the summer and fall of 1863 that all go very badly for the Confederacy
and basically leave the South permanently on the defensive. And one of those battles will be the
result of another Confederate attempt to invade the North. And you might remember that I
argued on the previous slide that invading the North was not a good tactic for the Confederacy
given the particular strengths and weaknesses of their war effort. And finally we'll turn to the
summer of 1864 when General William T. Sherman's capture of Atlanta basically guarantees
Abraham Lincoln's reelection as president and really sounds the death knell of the Southern
Confederacy.
Slide 5
Text: Summer 1862
[Map of 1862 Peninsular Campaign]
Audio: So let's turn now to this first turning point/missed opportunity in the summer of 1862. At
this point, the commander of the Army of the Potomac was General George McClellan, who
fancied himself the "Napoleon of the Western Hemisphere," if you will, if you will. He was a
tremendous organizer, I mean he was very good with logistics, and training, you know, kind of
whipping an army into shape on the parade ground and so forth and he was loved by his troops
because he was genuinely concerned about limiting their casualties. But as Lincoln would
discover, to the President's dismay, McClellan was cautious to a fault. He would always hesitate
to use his army decisively, even when he had all sorts of advantages. McClellan also had
political sympathies that placed him among the ranks of the Democrats. As a matter of fact, later
in the war, after McClellan had been fired a second time by Lincoln, and ended up retiring from
the army, he'll become the Democrats' nominee for president in 1864 and will run directly
against Abraham Lincoln. As a Democrat, McClellan was not interested in being too harsh in the
prosecution of the war. I mean, he wanted to win the war, but he was trying to pick tactics that
would avoid heavy casualties, on both sides, avoid casualties on both sides, and so he's not one
who's looking for the kind of decisive victories that Lincoln needs. And McClellan did not hold
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CONTESTED VISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
the President in very high regard personally. And let me just throw a quick anecdote in here. At
one point, early in the war, Lincoln was trying to press McClellan to be more aggressive and it
reached the point where Lincoln was actually willing to go visit McClellan at his home to talk
about it. And this already, if you're the Commander in Chief as the president, this is already
admitting a degree of weakness if you're going to the other guy's turf, so to speak. But Lincoln
goes to McClellan's home and when he gets to the rather large mansion, he's told by a servant
that the general is out, even though Lincoln had previously announced when he was going to be
showing up. And the servant tells Lincoln that he's welcome to wait. So the President spends
several hours sitting in a parlor in McClellan's home and when McClellan eventually arrives in
the evening, he comes in the back and decides to go to bed rather than see the President. So he
just sends his servant to tell the President that the general has retired for the evening. Now it's
hard to imagine you could get away with something like this today. It's openly disrespectful, but
Lincoln put up with it, to a degree because of the desperate circumstances. Much of the
correspondence between these two men can actually be amusing to read at times because Lincoln
would get increasingly sarcastic in his letters to McClellan, basically trying to urge him to be
more aggressive and at one point he says something to the effect of, "If you're not going to be
using the army for awhile, may I borrow it?" So, a good Commander in Chief recognizes that he
can't get too deep in the weeds with the details, you know, he should just be providing sort of the
overview, the general goals that he wants accomplished and then let your military professionals
achieve them. But for Lincoln, this was a very tricky thing in some cases because he had
generals who were either unable or in McClellan's case, probably more an instance of being
unwilling to do what was necessary. However, in 1862, McClellan did come up with a plan that
was designed to knock the Confederacy out of the war by capturing its capital of Richmond,
Virginia. And the idea was to hit Richmond from behind by making the amphibious landing
along the James River Peninsula, which is shown here on the map on your slide. And it's actually
a rather famous area because not only will there be some Civil War battles fought here, but this
is also where the first permanent English settlement in the New World was made in Jamestown,
Virginia, where there's a nice historical site today. But Jamestown was first settled back in 1607.
You also have Williamsburg, I mean Colonial Williamsburg is probably the finest reproduction
of colonial life that you'll find anywhere in this country. And the Battle of Yorktown, the last
major engagement of the American War for Independence was also fought on this peninsula. So
a very historic area, even as of back in the 1860s. So the idea was an amphibious landing along
this peninsula, and if McClellan's army could move rapidly enough, he could advance upon
Richmond before the Confederates could organize defenses. The problem was that this area of
Virginia tends to have very swampy conditions, especially in the summer and McClellan's army
ended up getting bogged down. Furthermore even though he was up against much smaller
Confederate forces initially, he hesitated to attack them. And the South was very adept at coming
up with forms of subterfuge to create the impression that they had a much larger army. And of
course, they're playing to McClellan's weakness of being overly cautious. He had an army of
over 100,000 men, but he only slowly moved towards Richmond, under these circumstances. By
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the time that McClellan finally gets to the vicinity of Richmond, General Robert E. Lee had
prepared a strong defense and in what were called "The Seven Days Battles," shown here on the
map, Lee repulsed McClellan and essentially saved the Confederate war effort. Historians will
generally argue that if Richmond had fallen so early in the war, it is unlikely that the South
would have been able to hold itself together. So here is a Union missed opportunity that also
began to establish the legend of Robert E. Lee as the deliverer or miracles. And part of the reason
for Lee's success stems from the exploits of Thomas Stonewall Jackson, whom I mentioned a
moment ago. Jackson was able to tie down larger Union forces by raiding throughout the
Shenandoah Valley of Western Virginia. Today this area helps form the boundary between the
two states of Virginia and West Virginia. But keep in mind that the western region of Virginia
had a majority of anti-slavery advocates and consequently, broke away from Virginia during the
war. So there was no state of West Virginia in 1861-62, but in 1863, West Virginia will become
a Union state based upon breaking away from Virginia. But back to the war, Jackson's men in the
Shenandoah Valley were so shadowy and rapid in their deployments that they were nicknamed
"The Foot Cavalry." So here's another Southern legend that was growing.
Slide 6
Text: Fall of 1862 – Battles of Antietam and Perryville
[Painting from Battle of Antietam]
Audio: The next turning point/missed opportunity transpired in the fall of 1862. By this point,
George McClellan was back in Washington, and the Confederacy was about to take the initiative.
Mid-term Congressional elections were going to be taking place soon in the North and the
Confederate leadership wanted to strike a blow that would demoralize the Union public and lead
to a loss of seats for Lincoln's coalition. The timing of this moment was also critical because the
British and French were on the fence about recognizing the Confederate government as
legitimate and strengthening their ties with the regime to include perhaps even becoming military
partners with it. Now you might ask yourself, "Well why would the British and the French be
willing to do this?" Well their textile industries were the major purchasers of southern cotton and
so there was a strong economic interest in maintaining some kind of relationship with the
Confederacy. But it was a tricky thing because the British and the French had outlawed slavery
decades before and many of their people were uncomfortable with the idea of getting too close to
a government to an attempt at a country here that still allowed slavery. So Abraham Lincoln and
the Confederate leadership were all well aware that the British and French were paying close
attention to this war and a key Southern victory might help to push them over the line into
assisting the Confederacy in greater intensity. In other words, for those of you who are familiar
with the American War for Independence, when the French monarchy got news of the big Patriot
victory in 1777 at Saratoga, New York, that was the key moment in causing Louis XVI decide to
back the revolution completely and send French forces into this part of the world. And without
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that, it is very unlikely that the Patriots would have won. The Confederates of course are hoping
that this invasion of the North will create that kind of Saratoga moment to assist their war effort.
So, there was a consensus among the Confederate leadership that the war had to be taken into
Union territory. Even though it would be mean extended supply lines and even though the
Confederate forces tended to be outnumbered wherever they went. But the South planned a twopronged invasion. In the west, Confederates would attack at Perryville, Kentucky. Since that
Union state was somewhat up for grabs at this point in the war and in the east, Robert E. Lee
would invade Maryland and seek battle in the vicinity of Sharpsburg, Maryland, also referred to
as "Antietam Creek." So the battle that's about to take place in the east is called either
"Antietam" or "Sharpsburg" depending upon how you choose to define your engagements. Now,
I'm going to focus on the Battle of Antietam because it was the more significant engagement of
the two. Before the battle, a Confederate cavalry officer in Lee's army happened to drop a cigar
container that held Lee's battle plans. Basically he was galloping through a corn field, this fell off
of his person and a Union soldier picked it up and brought it to McClellan. So essentially
McClellan was in a position to read Lee's mail. Even with this advance information, McClellan
would still not act decisively enough to maximize the situation. Now the two armies did clash at
Antietam and it was one of the bloodiest battles of the war and what you see here in your slide is
one of the more famous paintings of a key moment in the engagement. The total dead, wounded,
captured and missing for the North was more than 12,000 and for the Confederacy it was more
than 10,000. Now it was a victory for the North, because the Confederacy retreated south
afterwards, so Lee's invasion of the North had failed, but it was only a partial victory because
McClellan did not pursue Lee. I mean, he might have actually wiped out the entire army of
northern Virginia. So Antietam becomes another missed opportunity. But you can also turn it
around on the other hand and say that had Lee won big at Antietam, and continued to be able to
maraud in the North, he might have been able for example, to capture Philadelphia, because
Union forces would have been more focused on protecting Washington, D.C. and if the
Confederates had captured Philadelphia, enough political damage might have been done to
Lincoln for him to lose his Republican majority in Congress and therefore, he may have ended
up compelled to make peace on the South's terms, conditions that would have included
recognizing Confederate independence. So it is very important for the Union war effort that there
was at least a partial victory at the Battle of Antietam. By the way, the Confederates were also
defeated at Perryville, so the South had ultimately over-extended itself in its two-pronged
invasion in quest for victory. But the Battle of Antietam is important for other reasons that I want
to talk about for a few moments here. As the battle came to an end, in September, 1862, Lincoln
saw an important political opportunity. He had been waiting for the right moment to redefine the
war, to make it about more than just restoring the Union. He needed to make an important
political statement to redefine this war, but he knew that this statement would carry far more
weight if it was issued in the aftermath of a Union victory, because you want to do it when you
have momentum, you want to do it when it seems like you're winning a conflict. So although
McClellan had not given Lincoln the perfect triumph, it was going to have to be enough. Given
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the extraordinary casualties that had been suffered by this point in the conflict, anger against the
South had grown and therefore Lincoln decided that it was time to threaten to make this a war
about ending slavery. So after the Battle of Antietam, he issued one of the more famous political
statements in US history called "The Emancipation Proclamation." He basically gave the South a
deadline of January 1, 1863, so a couple months after the Battle of Antietam, he gives them a
deadline of January 1, 1863 to either surrender or else all slaves in Confederate held territory
would be freed. Now this is one of the most misunderstood moments in US history. We tend to
focus on the fact that Lincoln was threatening to free the slaves. You know, we call Lincoln "The
Great Emancipator," we've got the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in large part because
of his role in freeing the slaves. But what we frequently overlook about this moment in history is
that Lincoln did not want the South to call his bluff. He was laying down the ultimate threat to
their society, mainly freeing the slaves, in the hope that this would induce the Confederate to
surrender. But if they did surrender before that January 1st deadline, then Lincoln was not going
to free the slaves right away. What he wanted to do was more gradually emancipate them
through some kind of a compromise that might even include compensating slave owners. But of
course, what happens? The South did call Lincoln's bluff and therefore, when January 1, 1863
rolled around, he either had to make good on his threat or lose all credibility. So of course, he
went through with it and he does end up being remembered as the Great Emancipator. But the
truth is more complex. Some of these complexities lie in the loopholes around the Emancipation
Proclamation. I want you to keep in mind, please, that this proclamation did not apply to slaves
that in those states that were still in the Union. So I mentioned Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland,
Delaware, the Emancipation Proclamation has nothing to do with slaves in those Union states.
The Emancipation Proclamation also did not apply to Confederate territory that had already been
captured by the Union, as of the Battle of Antietam. For slaves who had escaped the Union lines
in those areas, they were regarded as contraband. Now that's basically a legal term that put these
slaves in a kind of limbo. I mean, they weren't really slaves anymore, but they weren't
completely free either. They typically worked as supply handlers for Union soldiers. Certainly a
step up from being a slave, but again, they were not emancipated. But once this proclamation
does go into effect, now in terms of the grand political definition of the war, it's now a war to end
slavery. Not all Northerners were thrilled about this. Not by a long shot, but the high casualties
of the conflict had hardened their attitudes towards the South and so more Northerners were
willing to make the war about taking that kind of a step. The final significance of the
Emancipation Proclamation and the fact that the South rejected it, or rejected Lincoln's threat,
was that it now opened the door for African Americans to be trained as Union soldiers and by the
end of the war, about 25% of soldiers in Union uniforms were black.
Slide 7
Text: Summer/Fall 1863
[Map of the Battle of Gettysburg]
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Audio: The third turning point or missed opportunity of the Civil War transpired over the
summer and fall of 1863. The Confederacy suffered a crippling series of blows that put the South
permanently on the defensive. In one case, the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi
River at Vicksburg. Ironically, this is where Jefferson Davis had his home. The last Confederate
stronghold at Vicksburg was captured thanks to a siege led by Union General Ulysses Grant,
who had made quite a name for himself in the Western theater of the war. So after the victory at
Vicksburg, this Confederacy was now split into. Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas were separated
from the rest of the Confederacy. And the Mississippi River, a major waterway so important to
commerce and military operations was now firmly in union control. So that obviously was a
disaster for the South. Also during this period of time, the union won a victory at Chattanooga,
Tennessee, which opened the way for an invasion of Georgia. By the way, a young union soldier
at the Battle of Chattanooga won the nation's highest military decoration; the Congressional
Medal of Honor. This soldier was the father of future US General Douglas MacArthur, who was
one of the military icons of the 20th century in US history. And Douglas MacArthur would also
eventually win the Congressional Medal of Honor. And they became the first, and I believe to
this point, the only father-son combination that's ever won that military decoration. But it's the
third battle during this period of 1863 that I want to concentrate on because it's the single most
significant engagement of the entire Civil War. What you also see here during this period of the
conflict is that Robert E. Lee decides to invade the North a second time. And he is eventually
going to be stopped at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania by the Army of the Potomac, led by George
Meade. McClellan had been fired for the second time by this point, and he's out of the military
picture. He will be back in the political picture, as I'll describe here in a few moments. But the
battle of Gettysburg was the bloodiest most significant engagement of the Civil War. The North
will have more then 23,000 dead, wounded, missing and captured. And for the Confederacy,
more than 28,000 soldiers will end up in one of those categories. Now, although an opportunity
was missed to destroy Lee's Army while it retreated, so much like the Battle of Antietam, this
will not be a complete union victory. The Confederates will never again have the initiative after
suffering these three defeats here in 1863. And once again, kind of looking at the what if's of
history, had Lee triumphed at Gettysburg, Northern public opinion might well have shifted
dramatically against continuing the war. Southern triumphs in these other two battles at
Vicksburg and Chattanooga would have delayed those campaigns for the North considerably
and, once again, weigh down morale and public opinion. Now I would like to cover Gettysburg
in more detail because it does tend to be an event that captures the imagination of students. In
July 1863, Lee having invaded the North, was maneuvering in southern Pennsylvania and
angling for making this invasion a big success to weaken Northern morale. Up to this point, the
sleepy town of Gettysburg was known pretty much for its religious seminary and little else.
Confederate and union forces begin to collide there. Now in your slide you have a map, and the
map tries to break down the events of the battle over several days. As union and Confederate
forces begin to run into each other, it was crucial that a much smaller union contingent was able
to hold off Southern units so that reinforcements could arrive and occupy the higher ground. The
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Confederacy did not realize the advantage that it had on the first day, while both sides were still
deploying their forces. And the initiative of a Union General, by the last name of Beauford, went
a long way toward setting up conditions that would eventually put the union in a good position to
win this battle. So day one was very important. On the second day of the battle, the Confederacy
ended up nearly outflanking union positions and turning Gettysburg into a huge victory. And it's
on this second day of the battle that you could argue that a professor of classical languages, of all
people, essentially saved the US Republic. I mean, if you look at what might have happened,
might well have happened if the Confederacy won this battle, and then if you look at what this
professor did on day two, it is remarkable. Now this man was Colonel Joshua Chamberlain of
Maine, who was, most of the time, a professor at Bowdoin College. But he was one of these
political appointees. Fortunately, he was a good one in the Union Army during the war. And he
commanded forces along one of the union's flanks. He had just fought off a Southern attack, and
his men were almost out of ammunition. Sensing that the Confederates were about to launch
another strike, he did something completely unexpected. He ordered his men to fix bayonets and
charge the Southern position. Now a bayonet, it's named after a French town where this device
was invented. It's basically a blade that you can attach to the end of a rifle or a musket so that if
you get into a close-quarter situation -- although, it's still somewhat awkward to use a rifle or a
musket this way, but with the blade at the end you could now use it as a close-quarter's weapon
to strike at your enemy, if you're in a position where shooting is really out of the question. So
this bayonet attack catches the Confederacy off guard and gives union forces time to stabilize
their position so they don't get outflanked. And that is one of the key developments on day two
of this battle. Now heading into day three, Robert E. Lee faces a real conundrum. From a purely
military perspective, he now knows that it's unlikely that he can win this battle. The union
occupies the higher ground. They’re well positioned now. They're settled in. So from a purely
military perspective, the smart thing for Lee to do would be to just retreat and live to fight
another day. But the problem, once again, is the politics of the war. At this particular moment,
with things having gone badly on some other fronts, Lee really needs a victory. He really needs
to effect Northern public opinion. He's up here in Northern territory. It's not easy to do this. He's
got to come away with more than he already has. So he decides to stick around and fight another
major engagement, and he decides to attack the very center of the union line, which happens to
be its strongest point. The center of union positions is laid out along the top of what was called,
Cemetery Ridge, which is somewhat of an ironic title given what's about to take place there. And
Robert E. Lee decides that he's got to go after that position, even though the odds are going to be
against Confederate success. At Cemetery Ridge union forces have plenty of artillery support.
And to attack Cemetery Ridge, Confederate troops are going to have to march one mile uphill in
plain view of union guns. In other words, they're going to have to take a ferocious beating before
they can even get close enough to union forces to attack them. Lee calls upon roughly 15,000
men, most of them Virginians, all under the command of General George Pickett of Virginia, to
make this assault. So this is going to be the infamous Pickett's charge. It's really going to be the
single most crucial moment of the entire Civil War. So Confederates prepare for this attack.
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They launch an artillery bombardment to try to soften up union defenses. But because
Confederate artillery is firing from a much lower elevation, most of their shells are exploding
harmlessly behind union lines. So while it might be heartening for the troops to see the Southern
artillery shells overhead, it's not really getting much done. Meanwhile, as the Confederate troops
begin marching up towards Cemetery Ridge, they begin taking heavy casualties from union
artillery but they keep on going. And as a matter of fact, Pickett's men reached the crest of this
hill and basically began fighting union troops at point-blank range. And for about 15 minutes it
was unclear who was going to ultimately be in control of Cemetery Ridge. In other words, for
about 15 minutes it wasn't entirely clear who was going to win this war. Nevertheless, the
Southern forces were ultimately repulsed at Cemetery Ridge. And of the roughly 15,000 men
who made Pickett's charge, fewer than half of them returned to Confederate lines due to either
being killed, wounded, captured, et cetera. Now as I indicated previously, after winning the
battle of Gettysburg, George Meade should have pursued Lee aggressively. He probably could
have trapped and caught Lee before he got back to Confederate territory and the Army of
Northern Virginia would have been destroyed and the war would have been over. He did not do
that. So once again, it's a partial union victory but still a very significant one.
Slide 8
Text: Summer of 1864 – Sherman’s Heyday
[Photo of William T. Sherman]
Audio: The final turning point or missed opportunity came in the summer of 1864. What you see
here on your slide is a photograph of one of the Union's most effective field commanders and
that was General William T. Sherman. Although a northerner, he had been teaching at a
Louisiana Military Academy when the Civil War broke out and he decided to put the uniform
back on and return to the service of his country. He was very upset for politicians for having
started this war. He was in no hurry to get into the fight but he felt it had to be done and like
Ulysses Grant, was a man who felt like once you got into a conflict like this, you had to really
fight to win. You had to use decisive tactics; you had to destroy your enemy's will to resist. And
in this regard, William Sherman is going to be one of the most unpopular Union commanders in
the south and in the memories of southerners for generations afterwards. In any case, Sherman
had been fighting in the western theater and a very effective commander and by the summer of
1864, he is now in command of an army, trying to take Atlanta from the Confederacy. And
Atlanta was one of the last major strongholds for the Confederates in this conflict. And the effort
had been bogged down for a while and this was increasing the frustration in the northern public
about the length of the conflict and meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln in 1864 is up for reelection.
And the Democrats have nominated retired General George McClellan to go up against him. And
although McClellan personally was saying that he would continue to fight the war if he was
elected president, many of McClellan's supporters were in favor of ending the war and allowing
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Confederate independence. And so a McClellan victory could be a very ominous thing for the
Union war effort. So Lincoln needed a victory during this political season and he would end up
getting it. William Sherman -- and by the way, this business of putting your hand inside your
tunic when you're being photographed, that was something that Napoleon Bonaparte had done on
a number of occasions while having a painting or portrait done of him. So sometimes officers in
other parts of the world would copy that practice. But anyway, another factor during this
campaign to take Atlanta was that there were peace talks that had recently begun that, again,
offered the possibility of letting the Confederacy escape from the war with its independence. But
William Sherman ultimately captures Atlanta here in the summer of 1864, which affects public
opinion in such a way that Lincoln is guaranteed a reelection and the peace talks were abandoned
afterwards so now it's really going to be fight to the finish. So this victory for the Union
ultimately seals the fate of the Confederacy. And as a matter of fact, after William Sherman
captured Atlanta, he then proceeded to have what they see in the south as his infamous march to
the sea, where as he headed towards the Atlantic Ocean and to gradually to move northward
towards Virginia, his forces would destroy every economic asset they could get their hands on.
They would tear up railroad tracks, they'd set fire to barns and granaries. They would do
whatever they could to take the war directly to the southern people, I mean not slaughtering
civilians, don't get me wrong but trying to destroy the southern economy by every means
possible to completely break the will of the Confederacy to resist. And so after the fall of Atlanta
and Sherman's march to the sea, it is just a matter of time before the Confederacy surrenders.
Slide 9
Text: Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse (April 1865)
[Painting of the surrender at Appomattox]
Audio: Let's turn now to that surrender. By the spring of 1865, things were looking very grim for
the South. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln had given General Ulysses Grant -- who had made his
name in the West as well -- had given Grant Field command of all Union armies. And Grant had
come east to Virginia and had been directly clashing with Robert E. Lee on the battlefield. Now
Ulysses Grant, who shown here seated on the right, closest to Robert E. Lee, he was not -- I
would not call him a brilliant General. And he was rumored to be an alcoholic. There's a bit of
dispute about that. He was a man who had pretty much failed in peacetime life, but he really
found his niche. And he'd even failed on the peace time Army, but he found his niche in the
wartime Army. And it wasn't that he was a brilliant commander, but he was just very dogged. He
was very determined to win. And he recognized, as Lincoln did, that if you can fight in the style
that produces heavy casualties on the enemy side, even if that means heavier casualties on your
own side, but if you can do that, when you outnumber the South three to one, I mean, you're
eventually going to win this war. I mean, your enemy just cannot keep pace in that kind of
environment. And Grant was willing to fight those kinds of battles. And you know, he lost a
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number of them, but the sort of casualties that he inflicted served the larger purpose of the war.
And this is one reason why Lincoln was very happy to stick with him. And in any case, by the
spring of 1865, you had Sherman's Army, had come far enough north that it was in Virginia. You
had Grant's Army in Virginia. And Robert E. Lee was gradually running out of options. The
Confederates eventually had to abandon Richmond, and Union forces captured the Confederate
capital. Abraham Lincoln came down and sat on Jefferson Davis's desk, for what it's worth.
Again, I like to throw in a few anecdotes. And by April of 1865, Robert E. Lee decided that there
was no point in fighting on any longer. And in the community of Appomattox Court House -again, that's actually the name of a town -- he decided to sit down with Ulysses Grant and discuss
terms of surrender. Now there are many paintings and renditions of what this meeting might have
looked like, and there are somewhat disputed accounts. Robert E. Lee apparently showed up in
his finest dress uniform, ever the Virginia gentleman, and offered Ulysses Grant his sword in
which was a tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries. I believe it goes back even somewhat earlier
than that. That, a commanding officer defeated in battle offers his sword to the -- to his
counterpart on the other side. And supposedly, Ulysses Grant showed up in a rather dirty
uniform. I mean, his style was more kind of down to earth and plain. But Grant was very
generous in the terms that he offered Lee. Although Lee surrendered on this day, his officers
were allowed to keep their horses, which was very important when you're going back to
communities that are economically devastated. And it really was a moment in which the victor
was respectful to the vanquished. And one officer, who was supposed to have been in attendance
at this surrender ceremony at Appomattox Courthouse, was a very young Calvary General in the
Union Army, named George Armstrong Custer. He had graduated at the very bottom of his class
at West Point. Now, today they call that person the anchorman. And that's actually something of
-- I would almost call it an honor. It's a long story. But your classmates kind of celebrate the fact
that at least you made it through. But he graduated at the bottom of his class at West Point. He
was a very rash, impetuous officer. And of course, he will go on after the war to be in command
of Calvary forces that get wiped out at the battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876; the most famous
defeat that US forces ever suffered on the Western frontier against Native Americans. But again,
just a little bit of an antidote. Now one more antidote, one more irony that is pretty remarkable
when you look at the Civil War. I mentioned earlier in my presentation that the first major battle
of the war was fought at Manassas Junction, Virginia or call it the Battle of Bull Run. Actually,
there ended up being two battles there. So it's this first one, is called, the first Battle of Bull Run.
And much of that battle was fought on the property of the McLean family. And recognizing that
they lived along a major avenue between the two capitals, the McLean's decided after the first
Battle of Bull Run to move. And ironically, the community that they moved to was Appomattox
Court House. And the parlor that you see here in this painting, where the surrender ceremony
was signed, was part of Wilmer McLean's home. So by the end of the Civil War, he could
legitimately say that the war had begun in his front yard and had ended in his parlor. And I'm not
making that up. It's just another bizarre irony.
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Slide 10
Text: Consequences of the War
[Painting of southern troops folding their flag]
Audio: I now turn to the results or consequences of the war and what you see here is a pretty
famous painting of a southern unit that has recently learned of Lee's surrender and is now folding
up its flag and preparing to disband. The nation that emerged from four years of total war was
not the same America that had split apart in 1861. Obviously you had about 618,000 men who
had been killed in the conflict who otherwise would have gone on to do other things with their
lives and their many female loved ones left behind temporarily increased the population of
unmarried women in the population and many of these women sought new opportunities for
making a living or serving the community that went beyond the traditional domestic roles that
had been prescribed for women. So let me run through a number of these consequences; they are
going to deal a bit with the role of government, with issues of gender, issues of class. During the
war, northern women pushed the boundaries of their traditional roles by participating on the
home front as fundraisers and in the rear lines as army nurses and members of the Sanitary
Commission. The Sanitary Commission promoted health in the northern army's camps through
attention to cleanliness, nutrition, and medical care. However, women were not limited to
playing roles as nurses; throughout the war they also filled key positions in the administration
and organization of patriotic organizations. Women in the north simultaneously utilized their
traditional position as nurturers to participate in the war effort while they advanced the new ideas
about their role in society. The large number who had served as nurses or volunteer workers
during the war were especially responsive to calls for broadening the "women's sphere" so to
speak. The war did not destroy the barriers -- the sexual equality that had long existed in
American society -- but the efforts of women during the Civil War broadened beliefs about what
women could accomplish outside of the home. The effect on white women in the Confederacy
was different from the effect of the war on women in the north. Southern women had always
been intimately involved in the administration of the farms and plantations of the south, but the
coming of the war forced them to shoulder even greater burdens at home. This was true for
wealthy plantation mistresses who had to take over the administration and maintenance of huge
plantations without the benefit of extensive training or the assistance of male relatives. The
wives of small farmers found it hard to survive at all, especially at harvest time when they often
had to do all the work themselves. The loss of fathers and brothers, the constant advance of
Union troops, and the difficulty of controlling a slave labor force destroyed many southern
women's allegiance to the Confederate cause. At the close of the conflict, southern women faced
the challenge of rebuilding a society that had been permanently transformed by the experience of
war. As in the north, the Civil War changed the situation of women in society. The devastation of
the southern economy forced many women to play a more conspicuous public and economic
role. These women resounded by forming associations to assist returning soldiers, entering the
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workforce as educators, and establishing numerous benevolent and reform societies or
temperance organizations. Although these changes created a more visible presence of southern
women in public, the south remained more conservative in its views about a woman's "proper
place" than did the north. Now we're going to deal with the racial impact of the Civil War when
we get into Reconstruction, but let me turn now to the impact of the war on white working
people. Those in the industrializing parts of the north had suffered and lost ground economically
because prices had risen much faster than wages during the conflict. But Republican rhetoric
stressing equal opportunity and the dignity of labor raised hopes that the crusade against slavery
could be broadened into a movement to improve the lot of working people in general. Foreignborn workers had additional reason to be optimistic. The fact that so many immigrants had
fought and died for the Union cause had, for the moment, weekend nativists or anti-immigration
sentiment and encouraged ethnic tolerance. What the war definitely decided was that the federal
government was supreme over the states and had a broad grant of constitutional authority to act
on matters affecting the common good. The southern principal of state sovereignty and strict
construction of the Constitution died at Appomattox and the United States was on its way to
becoming a true nation state with an effective central government, but it retained a federal
structure. Although states could no longer claim the right to secede or nullify federal law, they
still had primary responsibility for most functions of government. Everyone agreed that the
Constitution placed limits on what the national government could do and questions would
continue to arise about where federal authority ended and states' rights began. A broadened
definition of federal powers had its greatest impact in the realm of economic policy. During the
war, the Republican-dominated Congress passed a rash of legislation designed to give stimulus
and direction to the nation's economic development. Taking advantage of the absence of
southern opposition, Republicans rejected the Pre-Civil War tradition of laissez faire or a "handsoff" approach to the economy and instead actively supported business and agriculture. In 1862,
Congress passed a high protective tariff, approved the Homestead Act intended to improve the
settlement of the west by providing free land to settlers and granted huge tracks of public land to
railroad companies to support the building of a transcontinental railroad, and gave the states land
for the establishment of agricultural colleges. The Civil War also saw Congress set up a national
banking system that required member banks to keep adequate reserves and invest one third of
their capital in government securities. The notes the national banks issued became the country's
first standardized and reliable circulating currency; although this is still not the U.S. dollar, but
it's a major step in that direction. These wartime achievements added up to a decisive shift in the
relationship between the federal government and private enterprise. The Republicans took a
limited government that did little more than to seek to protect the marketplace from the threat of
monopoly and changed it into an activist state that promoted and subsidized the efforts of the
economically ambitious and industrious. The most pervasive effect of the war on northern
society was to encourage what's been called an organizational revolution. Aided by government
policies, venturesome businessmen took advantage of the new national market created by
military procurement -- that is military contracts with the private sector -- to build larger firms
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that could operate across state lines. Some of the huge corporate enterprises to the post-war era
began to take shape. So there was a real modernization of northern society and since the Union
won the war, this modernizing revolution is going to spread across the entire country.
Slide 11
Text: Reconstruction



Began with high hopes for social and political activism on behalf of freed slaves
Limited by white southern resistance, political corruption, and northern apathy
Left African-Americans in a distinctly second-class status that would continue into the
1950s-1970s.
Audio: Now let's turn to the Era of Reconstruction. The Union victory in April, 1865 settled two
major debates, but everything else was in doubt. Yes the Union was preserved and yes slavery
was dead and African Americans could now be free, but who would hold economic and political
power in the postwar south? How would the land be worked? How would labor be organized?
Above all, what would freedom actually mean for these ex-slaves? Answers to these questions
would emerge only after a decade and a half of intense political and social struggle, a campaign
that contemporaries hopefully called Reconstruction. I mean to even put that title on it is already
implying the outcome but by the time I reach the end of our material, you'll see that it was a
partial Reconstruction at best. There were four main sets of actors in this drama: The old
planners who fought to maintain their wealth, power, and control over the labor of the former
slaves; the freed people who sought land, education, and freedom from the planners domination;
the northern Republicans who sought to put their party on a solid basis nationally and to expand
the free labor system in the south; and to a lesser degree the white yeoman farmers -- this being
the small farmers, your poorer whites -- who struggled sometimes in alliance with African
Americans and Republicans to maintain their beleaguered political and economic independence.
The role of the northern Republicans in this drama tells us something very important about
Reconstruction; it was truly a national experience involving not only the transformation of the
south, but also a profound change in the very character of American society and politics. In this
sense, Reconstruction, though largely played out in the south, had vast national implications very
much like the Civil Rights Movement of the late 20th century. Yet Reconstruction was also an
intensely local, even personal, experience. Individual blacks from the first moments of their
newly won freedom, repeatedly asserted their rights to reunite their families, to found their own
churches where they could worship as they chose, to own land on which they could labor as free
men and women, to educate themselves and their children, and finally to exercise the full rights
of American citizenship. In less than a decade, they helped transform themselves legally and
politically from chattel property to full voting citizens of the United States, but this status would
prove to be short-lived for most of them.
Slide 12
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CONTESTED VISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
Text: Freedman’s Bureau
[Map of locations of Freedman’s Bureaus]
Audio: Because the Confederacy resisted for so long, in 1865, a constitutional amendment, the
13th, was passed outlawing slavery. Also in 1865, the Freedmen's Bureau was created to get the
federal government involved in assisting underprivileged citizens like never before in U.S.
history. Your slide here shows a map that summarizes facilities that were part of the Freedmen's
Bureau. The Freedmen's Bureau funded the building of black schools and allocated food and
medical services to impoverished blacks and whites in the former Confederacy. Thanks to the
Freedmen's Bureau and the 13th Amendment, many African-Americans were soon voting and
learning to read for the first time, not to mention getting a higher-level education. This showed
that northern public opinion had changed a bit due to the casualties and duration of the Civil
War. As the war came to an end in the spring of 1865, African-Americans and abolitionists felt
that a new era was dawning, where the old social order based on a black underclass had finally
been eradicated. As one black soldier put it, when he recognized his former master among a
group of Confederate prisoners he was guarding, "Hello, Massa, bottom rail on top this time." As
much as it seemed this way in the heady days of the spring of 1865, over the next 12 years or so,
the advocates of racial equality in America would be considerably disappointed. Reconstruction
would include the process through which the former Confederacy would be reintegrated into the
Union. Of course, with this reintegration came huge questions over what to do with the vast
population of ex-slaves, many of whom had been denied a proper education and the opportunity
to develop as skilled laborers. What is rather remarkable, and unfortunate, about Reconstruction
is that southern whites will be quite successful in retaining far more of their pre-war advantages
than many anticipated in 1865. Reconstruction will ultimately be only a modest victory for
advocates of racial equality, and many former slaves will ask themselves just how much their
lives have truly changed. Now, of course, Abraham Lincoln will not really be a player in
Reconstruction. He was assassinated in April 1865 while attending a play at Ford's Theatre. His
killer was Virginian John Wilkes Booth, who had been a one-time military cadet in attendance at
John Brown's execution, and also, an actor. After shooting Lincoln at virtually point-blank range
while the president's bodyguard had left his post, Booth leapt down to the stage, breaking a leg in
the jump. He apparently announced, "Sic semper tyrannis," Latin for "thus, always to tyrants."
This was also the Virginia state motto. He was later hunted down and killed. Before Abraham
Lincoln was slain, he intended to go very easy on the South in terms of what conditions he would
set for southern states to return to the Union. He pardoned the vast majority of Confederate
soldiers and politicians. He also established a rule, whereby as soon as 10% of the voting public
in 1860, in other words, before the war began -- as soon as 10% of the voting population in 1860
in each southern state took an oath of loyalty to the Union and formed a government, that
government would be recognized by the Lincoln administration. In other words, Lincoln was
setting the bar very low for what it would take for these former Confederate states to come back
into the fold. He recommended that southern whites grant blacks the vote, but he did not make it
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a requirement to return to the Union. Again, setting the bar very low. Lincoln was making it clear
that he would not be very tough on the South. He hoped that this Republican Party would begin
to win votes in this part of the country. But Lincoln's assassination produced a bizarre turn of
political events. His vice president, who now assumed the highest office in the land, was actually
a southerner, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. Now, he was what was called a Southern Unionist.
He had never supported secession. He had remained loyal to the United States. But as a
southerner, he too favored going easy on the former Confederacy. Johnson had traditionally
represented the interests of lower-class whites, which meant that he was no friend of the planter
aristocracy in the South. But as a white southerner, he was also no fan of racial equality. He
appointed interim governors in the South, who in most cases had opposed secession, but who
also rejected emancipation and other civil rights measures. When Johnson looked back on
secession and the Civil War, he saw it as the work of just a few evil individuals who hijacked the
South rather than as the logical outcome of a clash between two social systems. So therefore, he
was willing to pardon plenty of former Confederate leaders who seemed repentant, because he
saw the problem merely as one of sin. The conditions that he set for southern states to reenter the
Union were barely any tougher than Lincoln's. Southern states would have to endorse the 13th
Amendment, which had outlawed slavery. Southern states would have to repudiate any
Confederate war debts leftover from the conflict. And they would have to recant the Act of
Secession. Meanwhile, Johnson was providing presidential pardons to numerous former
Confederate leaders who were now finding their way back into government. The elections of
1865 in the South put into office the former vice president of the Confederacy, four Confederate
generals, five colonels, six members of the Confederate Cabinet, and 58 Confederate
congressmen. In Louisiana, former Confederate officers wore their uniforms in the Legislature.
These new southern governments began enacting laws to restrict the rights of freed slaves,
including the so-called Black Codes. These regulations imposed curfews, delineated what kinds
of jobs freed slaves could take, and restricted their ability to move to other communities. This
helped to lead to situations where many former slaves were working for their one-time masters.
The Black Codes could never be perfectly enforced due to labor shortages and opposition from
the Freedmen's Bureau, but they set off a political firestorm in Washington. A faction of the
Republican Party, known as the Radicals, wanted to punish the South and enhance federal power
in order to carry out a more sweeping reconstruction of southern life. This group included former
abolitionists, among them Charles Sumner of the 1856 caning incident that some of you might be
aware of. Even more moderate Republicans were outraged at how easily President Johnson was
treating the former Confederacy. Republicans had enough votes in Congress to refuse to seat the
newly elected southern members and began to confront President Johnson openly over
Reconstruction policy. Meanwhile, Democrats began to use race-baiting tactics to encourage
voters to see the Republicans as going too far towards racial equality. As one southern
Democratic newspaper editor put it, the president should be applauded for opposing the
"compounding of our race with niggers, gypsies and baboons." As another Democrat put it, if
Congress declared African-Americans to be citizens, "how long will it be before it will say that
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the Negroes shall vote, sit in the jury box, and intermarry with your families?" Johnson had
recently vetoed two bills backed by most Republicans. One would extend the life of the
Freedmen's Bureau, and the other was a civil rights bill conferring full citizenship on freed
people. In 1865, Congress overrode both of these vetoes, the first major congressional overrides
in U.S. history. So you're getting a strong sense of the political controversy that accompanied
Reconstruction.
Slide 13
Text: Fifteenth Amendment
[Image of African-Americans voting]
Audio: In 1866, a Republican-dominated Congress passed the 14th Amendment, which granted
full citizenship to African Americans and prohibited states from denying equal protection under
the law. Traditionally in U.S history the states had been seen as the guarantors of individual
liberty. Now the federal government was increasingly playing that role. But the 14th Amendment
did not guarantee blacks the vote; it only said that southern representation in Congress would be
reduced proportionally for those denied the vote. The problem was that many moderate
Republicans were still not ready to endorse the vote for blacks so radical Republicans had to take
the best deal that they could get. Women's rights activists were very upset that nothing was put
into the 14th Amendment to address their desire for suffrage. Jumping ahead a few years, in
1869, the Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution and I have here a famous artist's
rendition of what that experience might have been like. Among other things, the 15th
Amendment declared that states could not deny the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or
previous condition of servitude so at face value, it appeared to be a means of safeguarding the
suffrage for ex-slaves and thus you have images like this of African Americans voting for the
first time including a soldier, and then a gentleman in the front here would appear to be a former
slave. So you know you have wonderful scenes like this and certainly there was significant
progress. I mean your first African American members of Congress were elected during the
Reconstruction period and you currently had plenty of black voting. However, I would like you
to appreciate that the language of the 15th Amendment was deliberately designed to not say
anything about other ways that African Americans could be denied the vote. In other words,
there are ways without using the explicit language of race or language about your previous
condition of being a slave; there are still ways to deny someone the vote. For example; you could
create a poll tax. In other words, you know you have to pay a certain fee if you're going to show
up and vote. I mean if you know that most of your poorer population is African American, then
this is a way to effectively deny them the vote. You could also put in a literacy requirement and
frankly even if African Americans can read, one technique that you'll see a bit later in U.S.
history is that they won't just have to demonstrate they can read, but that they can interpret
something. And so you can take something like a State Constitution with all of its legalese
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CONTESTED VISIONS: THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
language and ask them not only to read it, but interpret it and of course the white clerk
administering this test can already have made up his mind that you're not going to pass. It's a
very subjective kind of test so this will be another technique that can be used. The bottom line is
during the late 19th century, southern states will use a variety of loopholes in the 15th
Amendment to deny the vote to huge numbers of African Americans. As a matter of fact by
1900, fewer than one third of blacks in the south can actually vote. The 15th Amendment also
said nothing about denying the vote to women despite the fact that early feminists had been
promised by their male allies in the Anti-Slavery Movement that once slavery was abolished, the
next great reform battle would be giving women the vote. That's why during the late 19th
century, many feminists turned to exclusively female organizations to pursue their agendas. Now
let me turn to some other subjects that are related to these Constitutional Amendments. I have
mentioned a few times in this lecture how American attitudes are changing as to how liberty is
protected in our constitutional system, not to mention how citizens define liberty in the first
place. Traditionally, Americans had utilized what we call a negative idea of liberty. Now using
the term "negative," I'm not attaching a value judgment. By negative, I mean liberty as the
absence of restraint; as the absence of government restaurant. So you know negative liberty is
freedom from interference by an outside authority; it is freedom from. For example; a law
requiring motorcyclists to wear a helmet would be an assault on negative liberty by preventing
people from enjoying the freedom to go bareheaded if they wish. The 13th Amendment with its
ban on slavery can be thought of as an assault on negative liberty for those who wish to consider
human beings as property. Now slavery was the most extreme example of negative liberty. I
mean it can also refer to protections that almost all of us would agree are absolutely appropriate.
I mean for example; the freedom for each of us to practice our faith as we see fit, to assemble
peacefully. You know these are also examples of negative freedom. But the era of the Civil War
and Reconstruction is ushering in another focus on a different kind of liberty that we call
"positive" and it's more the "freedom to" if you will. It's not necessarily incompatible with
negative liberty, but it just has a different focus. Another way of defining the distinction between
these two concepts is to describe their relation to power. Negative liberty and power are at
opposite polls. Power is the enemy of liberty, especially power concentrated in the hands of a
central government. This is the kind of power that many of the founding fathers had feared the
most which is why they fragmented power in the Constitution in the federal system. That is why
they wrote the Bill of Rights to restrain the power of the national government to interfere with
individual liberty. The first 10 Amendments to the Constitution will be called the Bill of Rights
are an excellent example of negative liberty. Nearly all of the first 10 Amendments apply the
phrase, "Shall not," to the federal government. In fact 11 of the first 12 Amendments place
limitations on the power of the national government. But then beginning with the 13th
Amendment in 1965, 6 of the next 7 Amendments radically expanded the power of the federal
government at the expense of the states. The very language of these Amendments illustrate the
rise of power -- oh excuse me, the rise of positive liberty. In other words, those who support
positive liberty see federal power as more of a reforming impulse of our lives; they see it as a
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more proactive and an empowering force in our lives. They're more optimistic about what federal
power can do for us. So the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments are all in that context of this new focus
upon positive liberty. Abraham Lincoln played a crucial role in this historic shift of emphasis of
negative to positive liberty. Those southerners who seceded from the Union in the name of
preserving their liberties and rights, including the right to own slaves, were acting in the tradition
of negative liberty; though that's not to suggest that negative liberty is always a bad thing. But
Lincoln used federal power to achieve a positive liberty for slaves. Now positive liberty is an
open-ended concept; it has the capacity to expand towards notions of equity, justice, social
welfare, equality of opportunity. But it is also controversial because it puts government in the
business of social engineering if you will, and therefore, potentially can be overbearing and
paternalistic. But at least some degree of this positive liberty would seem to be necessary. As an
advocate of positive liberty would put it, "How free is a motorcyclist who is paralyzed for life by
a head injury that could have been prevented if he had worn a helmet? How much freedom of the
press can exist in a society of illiterate people? How much liberty does a starving person have
except the liberty to waste away?" Ok having covered that, let me try to get back into more of the
chronology of Reconstruction. President Johnson, you know while these Amendments were
being passed, condemned Congress for going tough on southern representatives and he urged
southerners to reject the 14th Amendment. As the Congressional midterm elections of 1866
approached in the north, news arrived of anti-black violence in the south, including a riot in
Memphis that took 46 lives and another in New Orleans that killed 34 plus 3 sympathetic whites.
The Republicans consequently did well in those elections which emboldened the radicals to push
for an even more aggressive Reconstruction.
Slide 14
Text: Reconstruction Act of 1867
[Map of the Reconstruction Act of 1867]
Audio: So what did this more aggressive Reconstruction look like? In 1867, Radical
Republicans presented a plan that would reduce the southern states to territories under military
rule. Ex-Confederates would be disenfranchised -- that means, the vote taken from them -- and
land would be redistributed to ex-slaves. Massive federal assistance would be provided to
southern schools. This was the Radical Republican vision for Reconstruction. Now again, many
moderate Republicans could not go along with all of this, so a compromise was reached. As
depicted here on this map you see on your slide, the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which was
passed over President Johnson's veto by the way, divided the former Confederacy into five
military districts. Federal troops would maintain U.S. authority on American soil. New state
constitutional conventions would be held in which blacks could participate. Any new state
constitutions would have to include the vote for blacks. The 14th Amendment would have to be
ratified in order for states to return to the Union. Attitudes had truly changed. As one northern
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newspaper put it, "Six years ago, the North would have rejoiced to accept any mild restriction
upon the spread of slavery as a final settlement. Four years ago, it would have accepted peace
upon the basis of gradual emancipation. Two years ago, it would have been content with
emancipation and equal civil rights for the colored people with extension of the suffrage. One
year ago, a slight extension of the suffrage would have satisfied it." But now, obviously, more
was necessary. In fact, Republicans in Congress who wanted to punish the Confederacy became
so enraged with President Johnson that in 1868, the House of Representatives impeached him.
Now, I'm not sure how familiar you are with the impeachment process. Impeachment is a
scenario where a combination of the two houses of Congress decides first that the president has
committed at least one high crime or misdemeanor, and then secondly, that he should be
removed from office for doing it. It is a two-part process. Basically, what happens is that the
House of Representatives, the lower house, the people's house, is responsible for determining
whether or not a president has actually committed a high crime or a misdemeanor. So the first
step is not entirely unlike an indictment. To impeach a president, all it takes is a majority vote in
the U.S. House of Representatives that, again, at least one high crime or misdemeanor has been
committed. Then, if a president is impeached, the Senate holds a kind of trial to determine
whether or not he should be removed from office. Now, this has only happened twice in our
history, so we don't have a great many episodes to draw upon, but what has happened is that the
chief justice of the Supreme Court will come over and act as sort of a judge in the proceedings.
The president can hire lawyers to speak on his behalf and argue his case before the Senate. And
members of the House who had voted to impeach can come over to the Senate and act, in effect,
as prosecuting attorneys. And the jury, if you will, is the Senate itself. And the Senate will
eventually vote on whether or not to remove the president. Now, because removing a president is
a very big step, it takes a two-thirds majority -- not just a simple majority, but a two-thirds
majority -- to make it happen. Now, in U.S. history, we have never actually removed a president.
Two presidents have been impeached. One of them was Andrew Johnson right here during
Reconstruction. He was impeached in 1868 over a law called the Tenure of Office Act, which
stated that the president could not remove Senate-confirmed appointees without Senate approval.
And this was actually -- Johnson was on pretty solid ground here, but this was a very politically
motivated impeachment. This was more about him going easy on the South than anything else.
But in the removal phase, Johnson survived. By just one vote, he survived being removed from
office. Now, it was very late in his term. It would have been almost symbolic more than anything
else, but he survived. So he was impeached but not removed. As many of you probably know,
Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice. But he survived his removal
vote by a much more comfortable margin than Andrew Johnson. And then I'll sort of put an
asterisk on this one. Had Richard Nixon not resigned as president in 1974, it is very likely that he
would have at least been impeached and perhaps removed. The House Judiciary Committee
voted to impeach him, but before the vote could go to the entire House floor, Richard Nixon
decided to resign. So a little bit of a civics lesson here, but ultimately, Andrew Johnson was
impeached as one of the byproducts of Reconstruction.
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Slide 15
Text: End of Reconstruction – How much has really changed?
[Political cartoon depicting the end of Reconstruction]
Audio: To wrap up this lecture, let me introduce two terms that are commonly associated with
Reconstruction. One of them is "carpet bagger." Carpet baggers were Northerners who came
south during the early stages of Reconstruction to fill government positions, some of which were
appointive and others of which were elective. As outsiders to the South, they were naturally
resented by most Southern whites and some of them were corrupt. And thus, they gave
Reconstruction a bad name. So going back to a slide that I had early on here, I said that political
corruption was one of the reasons why Reconstruction wasn't more successful. And in fairness to
white Southerners, I mean, this was a real problem. Frankly, it was a problem throughout the
country, and this is not the time to go into great detail on it, but Reconstruction governments did
include individuals who took bribes, who squandered public money, who in various ways did not
act on behalf of the common good. And so it's not 100% the fault of white Southerners that
Reconstruction didn't work out. I mean, it's a complicated picture. But of course, it was also in
the best interest of those who had supported secession and the Confederate war effort to cast
carpet baggers in the worst possible light. So not everything you hear about carpet baggers is
going to be honest, either. Another term that's common to Reconstruction was "scallywags."
Scallywags were white Southerners who supported the Republican Party. Now they were
obviously a distinct minority of the white, Southern population and they included those who had
never considered secession to be a wise move in the first place. But anyway, so scallywags are
another category. Small category, but they're worth mentioning. As African Americans came to
vote in the South, needless to say, they cast their ballots for Republicans and as I mentioned the
first black members of Congress were from Southern states during Reconstruction and they were
Republicans. The Southern Democratic Party remained, for all intents and purposes, the party
resisting racial equality to varying degrees. But just to fast forward a little bit into history, this
political cartoon pretty well depicts the end of Reconstruction. So let me say a few things about
this. In 1876, there was a highly contested presidential election in which Congress could not
agree that the balloting in all of America's states had been honestly conducted. In other words,
there was a disputed presidential outcome. Some of you know about Florida in 2000, there were
several states where there was that kind of a hullabaloo after the election of 1876. So there wasn't
a clear winner. And a Congressional commission had tried to sort this thing out, they weren't
getting anywhere, so the country did not yet have a new president designated. Ultimately, in
1877, an important compromise was reached. The Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes
was allowed to become president, but in exchange for getting their president, the Republicans
had to agree to give up on Reconstruction. So in 1877, Reconstruction effectively came to an
end. Federal troops were gradually removed from the South, Northerners who already had been
getting pretty apathetic about Reconstruction paid even less attention to it and less attention to
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what was going on in the South, so the whole thing basically fizzles out. And as is indicated by
this cartoon, it basically leaves former slaves at the hands of the sort of people who had been
running their lives before the war, and who had opposed every bit of Reconstruction. So for
example, the Ku Klux Klan had emerged as a vigilante organization during Reconstruction. It
was staffed by many former Confederate soldiers and it was acting, again, as a vigilante arm of
the Southern Democratic Party. And you also had what was called the White League. This was a
more overt attempt to control political life in the South. Frederick Douglass, himself an escaped
slave and a leader of the African American community put it very well when he wrote about how
the worst thing that Northerners could do to the African American community in the South was
to leave them in the hands of their former masters, and that's essentially what happens. The
Freedman's Bureau ended up accomplishing far less than it was originally hoped for by
reformers. All those efforts basically came to a halt and what happens then is that the former
Confederacy, first of all, it becomes a one party system politically. The Democrats will control
the South pretty solidly until about the mid-1960s. And the South will essentially be in a kind of
stasis where decades after the Civil War and Reconstruction, you'll still have this very distinct
sense that African Americans are second-class citizens, and it's reinforced in a variety of ways.
And again, this is not the lecture to go into all of the details on that. But I do want you to
appreciate the extent to which Reconstruction was a partial victory at best. There will be a
systematic disenfranchisement of African American voters and new battles will have to be
fought down the road to get them back to citizenship status, to full citizenship status.
Slide 16
Text: Primary sources useful for paper assignments on Reconstruction





Wade-Davis manifesto against Lincoln’s Reconstruction policy (1864)
Article entitled “Reconstruction” by Frederick Douglass (1866)
Appeal to Congress for African-American voting rights by Frederick Douglass (1867)
Call for moderation by John Sherman (1867)
Southern Republican assessment by Albion Tourgee (1879)
Slide 17
Text: Primary sources useful for paper assignments on prosecution of war





Harrison’s Landing letter from George McClellan to Lincoln (July 1862)
Emancipation Proclamation by Lincoln (1862)
Gettysburg Address by Lincoln (1863)
Grant’s account of first meeting with Lincoln (1864)
Comments on necessity of holding elections by Lincoln (1864)
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